AMD's "Zen/Summit Ridge" CPUs coming 2016

RUMOR

AMD's "Zen/Summit Ridge" CPUs coming 2016

It has been over two years since AMD's Piledriver CPUs arrived on AMD's Flagship AM3+ socket and remains AMD's highest performing CPU architecture to date, with AMD newer bulldozer derivatives only being available as Quad core models on AMD's FM2+ Socket.

AMD are working on a new CPU architecture, codenamed Zen, which will be the CPU core design behind AMD's Summit Ridge Family of CPUs. The AMD Zen Architecture will be an all new from the ground up architecture which will be made on either Samsung's or Global Foundries' 14nm process and has been designed by world class Engineers like Jim Keller.

AMD's Summit Ridge CPUs are expected to launch in Q3 2016.

Moving from a 32nm to 14nm process alone will lead to reduced power consumption and decreased manufacturing costs for AMD, which will be very beneficial for AMD when it comes to creating low powered, more efficient CPUs.

Sweclockers say that AMD's Zen/ Summit Ridge CPUs will contain up to a maximum of 8 CPU cores and a TDP of up to 95W, an impressive feat given that AMD's current Flagship 8 core Piledriver CPU has a TDP of 220W.

AMD's Zen/Summit Ridge CPUs are also expected to use DDR4 memory, bring AMD in line with Intel's Haswell-E platform and Intel's upcoming Skylake CPUs. By the release of AMD's Summet Ridge CPUs in 2016 DDR4 memory is expected to have became much more affordable. Right now it is unclear if AMD will be using dual or Quad channel DDR4 memory, though it is more likely to be dual channel.

As far as process tech goes AMD's former CEO, Rory Read, said that they would continue to advance as the tech becomes available and profitable.

"We’ll continue to go down the curve. We’re gonna go Fins and we’re gonna go 14 and 10 and all those things will occur but we want to do it in an orderly way."

"Will we move down to Fins ? yes absolutely and the next generation of products go there as we introduce them in 16 (2016). But you want to do that as you catch the cost curve and the yield curve at the right place so that it makes sense for us."

AMD new CEO, Lisa Su, recently said that AMD are looking to use their new CPU designs to update their Server CPUs, most of which still use the Piledriver CPU Architecture, over the next few years. This will be with the addition both x86 and ARM processors to market.

“From where we are today, our [server] product portfolio in x86 is several years old, and we are certainly looking at updating that over the next couple of years. As we look at the opportunity in server, particularly in dense server, there’s an opportunity for both x86 and ARM, and so we are going after the newer markets in server versus some of the traditional enterprise,”

The future will be very interesting for AMD, with a new CPU architecture coming as well as a major shift in process tech AMD may move into a position where it can finally become competitive in the marketspace again, but until then we have a long wait ahead of us with little to no chance of any upgrades to AMD's current high end line-up.

Everything there sounds very achievable, AMD already have an 8 Core with a 95w TDP with their FX 8370e and 8320e.

Hopefully by the time these CPUs are released DDR4 will be inexpensive and that AMD's move to 14nm and and the Zen Architecture will yield a significant leap in performance.

aye it does sound very achievable, and with the added bonus of DDR4 as AMD CPU's benefit from fast RAM. just hope the architecture changes have the grunt, saying that it might not matter as much with the way things are being threaded these days plus with Direct X12 coming too, AMD might be in a very good position for gaming.Quote

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